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Why I’m writing more and you should too. I asked chatGPT what it thought about me. As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, Colin Karpfinger was not a widely recognized public figure, and his personal or professional details were not widely available in the public domain. Therefore, it’s challenging for me to provide a… Continue reading Write More

On April 1, 2020 I left the company I founded 11 years earlier, and started on what I thought would be a 3 month experiment of self-education. Nine months later, I’ve found my next “career” and I couldn’t be happier with the result. I’m here to share what I learned in hopes it will be… Continue reading WTF is a Sabbatical?

Using the Raspberry Pi to keep the plants alive I was looking for a good excuse for a Raspberry Pi project when we started talking about driving back to Wisconsin rather than flying. I’ve never done the 34 hour drive before and wasn’t planning on doing it soon, but Covid changed that. Soon enough it… Continue reading Watering Plants

I wanted to build a new desk for my room that looked nice but was substantial and sturdy feeling. After making tons of furniture with iron pipe fittings I decided to try something new. The legs are a mix of minimal modern designs and saw horses. The more modern legs seemed too thin for such a… Continue reading Slab Desk

  I made a piece of functional art with the LightBlue Bean! It uses python to pull the report, and the LightBlue Bean (essentially a BLE Arduino) to receive the data over bluetooth low energy and set the LEDs. The general conditions are indicated by the color of the LED (blue is poor, green is… Continue reading Functional art with Arduino: A painting that displays the surf report

It’s cool living blocks from the ocean, except for all that salty air rusting away anything in its path. I replaced my front forks on my Kawasaki Ninja 500R about 10 months ago, and they were pitting again.  I read a bunch of info on forums on how people are solving this, and decided to… Continue reading Rusty Forks (not spoons)

I’m quite happy to announce that Thumbies are now available nationwide at BestBuy locations, and online! Thumbies Standard Pack at BestBuy – $14.99 Thumbies Pro Pack at BestBuy – $19.99 The iPhone was clearly not built specifically for gaming.  Not having tactile buttons that you can feel is a major problem for any serious gamer. … Continue reading Announcing Thumbies – Solving all your iPhone gaming frustation

“There are 2 ways to learn antenna design.  One way is to go to grad school.  I’ll teach you the other way” -A mentor of mine Engineers love to refer to wireless as ‘black magic’.  Which is partly true.  But with the right tools and the willingness to fuck it all up (a few times),… Continue reading The Dropout’s Guide to PCB Trace Antenna Design

I’m happy to see a couple Punch Through Design clients getting press.  Both Pedal Brain and Shepherd are mentioned in the article: The iPhone and the iPod Touch, it’s a pretty cheap platform and it has a lot of power behind it,” said Colin Karpfinger, owner of hardware and software developer Punch Through Design.  “It’s… Continue reading Clients Mentioned in Minneapolis Star Tribune

So you’ve figured out EAGLE’s design quirks, you’ve routed all your airwires and you’re wondering what next.  This guide will take you from a .brd file in EAGLE to a professionally made PCB.